The Iranian highlands: Mining regions of the Central Plateau between resilient and precarious societal and economic strategies.

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The arid highlands of Iran are characterized by an enormous richness in mineral resources. Although the region is dominated by the poverty of water, by pastoral systems and horticultural systems in oases, sustainable strategies were achieved by highland societies to manage the exploitation of these resources and to establish their exploitation and to establish very specific raw material regimes. The societal and economic influence can be envisaged especially during the beginnings of metallurgy during the 5th and 4th mill. BCE, in the initial phases of the Iron Age and especially during the Achaemenid and Sasanian empires when mineral resources became important factors of political strategies. This was possible on the basis of rural systems that were capable of developing resilient living and subsistence strategies that allowed exploitation of local and regional resources successfully and continuously. The central question to be answered is to understand how miner-herder-practices were influenced by institutional demands in stable and large raw material deliveries, and how these demands altered raw material networks, the strategies of subsistence and patterns of mobility as part of complex social organisations, as well as visions of economies, preferably of rural communities being involved with these productions. To enable syntheses the project intends to collect interdisciplinary data from various case examples. Besides the salt-mining landscape around the salt-mine of Chehrabad, the project plans to investigate mining and metallurgical production-centres and their settlement and subsistence systems near Takestan and Shakan (Qazvin province), the area of the copper deposits of Veshnaveh (studied already in field between 2000-2005), and the mineral resource management of Halil Rud “civilisation” in Kerman. Examples of four different time-periods will be investigated by help of surveys, small-scale excavations in mines and single settlement and production-sites and compared to each other in a structural sense (layout of installations and infrastructure, subsistence strategy, economic strategy).